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If I Could Time Travel #1: The 1977 New York Blackout (Patreon)

Published:

2018-09-17 06:55:12

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2024-02

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Essays Fast History If I Could Time Travel New York

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I am OBSESSED with the idea of time travel. I love historical fiction books, tv shows, and movies for allowing me to feast on vintage dialogue, traditions, fashion, music and food- but it can't possibly compare to actually witnessing things firsthand. And not even just seeing things- but smelling them and hearing them as well. I'm a weirdo who wonders what the world used to smell like and agonizes over the fact that I'll never be able to hear the actual voices of people like Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, or Harriet Tubman. While those possibilities are forever closed to me (unless someone really creates time travel in my lifetime), I sometimes wonder if the future of virtual reality technology will allow me to be inserted into the past and have a more rich experience reliving it. This thought inspired this new monthly patreon series, in which I will seek to answer one question:

If I could time travel, which American places and eras would I visit?

The Only Rule: I stay black, female, and broke no matter the time period or region.

As you might be able to tell when reading this in the coming months, the options for time travel that wouldn't significantly risk my life as a black woman are mainly after 1900. However, I will be exploring as many periods as I can, and in future installments you'll be able to deduce how minorities have been erased from some of this country's most pivotal moments,. This series will include mountains of primary sources, pictures, and small details, and I'm very excited about it! At the end of each installment, be sure to tell me whether you would or wouldn't time travel to experience the event I've described. :)

In this first installment of If I Could Time Travel, I go back in time to:

The 1977 New York City Blackout

The year is 1977. Grab a food that became popular or debuted during the 70s- General Tsos (1970), an Egg McMuffin (1972) or Pasta Primavera (1977), for example- and settle in for a good read!

The Situation:

At 8:37PM on July 13th 1977, lightning struck and tripped a circuit breaker in Buchanan, NY. Quite a few citizens were glued to their seats watching the Yankees versus the Milwaukee Brewers game on TV and were confused and angry when the power went out. Some fans didn't miss a beat, simply turning on their transistor radios to hear the rest of the game. While most people initially thought the power would be restored shortly, the city would be alive in complete darkness for a total 25 hours. According to Time Magazine in 1977:

"For a short while after the lights flickered out, most New Yorkers refused to believe that a crisis was at hand and gamely carried on. Broadway actors performed under the uncertain beams of flashlights held by stagehands; the nude cast of Oh! Calcutta!, unable to grope to their dressing rooms, borrowed clothes from members of the audience and went home in cabs. Waiters at Manhattan restaurants served patrons by candlelight. Buses were delayed only slightly by darkened traffic lights. Garbage trucks whined as usual on their nightly rounds. Mayor Abraham Beame, assuming, like many citizens, that a fuse had blown, ad-libbed a quip during a campaign speech at the Co-op City Traditional Synagogue in The Bronx. "See," he said. "This is what you get for not paying your bills."

Though NYC had suffered minimally through a blackout in 1965 and terrified citizens without much looting, the Blackout of 77 was different because it was longer and was more "celebratory", despite a significant increase in looting. New Yorkers have always had a reputation for coming together in times of crisis, and the 1977 Blackout was no different. One New York Times writer who experienced both the 1965 and 1977 blackouts recalled:

"There must have been emergency lighting set up because I found the concourse jammed with marooned if well-behaved travelers snacking on donuts and fried chicken — they still had food stands down there then, just as a triple X-rated world reigned upstairs along the fearsome Deuce. The usual anarchic and ominous chaos had been replaced by an almost festive air, I was surprised to find. With the first power surges and signal blackouts, quick-thinking transit engineers had shunted trains into the nearest stations all over the city, leaving only a handful stuck in the tunnels. I headed across town to Grand Central where cabbies, like taxi drivers at the Marne, were shouting out destinations like “Yonkers” and “Westchester,” filling up with strangers — very much like the heroic evacuation that was to distinguish another New York catastrophe a quarter of a century later."

The Blackout of 1977 was different from the one in 1965 for a number of reasons. While in 1965 the blackout occurred on a cool October day, in 1977 the city was under a scorcher of a heat wave. The city's cops were in a fury over a new policy implemented by the mayor; only one cop per car (no more partners). To protest, only 8,000 of the cities 25K scheduled law enforcers showed up for work on July 13th. They had no idea that that very day would be the day all hell broke loose. In pre-gentrified Bushwick, the areas 90,000 residents began the blackout with just 14 police officers on-duty. To compound matters, the city was already in a frenzy about finding the elusive serial shooter/killer known by the press as the "Son of Sam", later to be revealed as David Berkowitz. The city's inhabitants were so afraid of leaving their homes that people stopped roaming the streets alone that summer. So when the lights went out, folks had to keep in mind that there was a crazed maniac running the streets (which is always the case in NY, but this guy had a catchy moniker).

Most of the city's 17 hospitals and a few of the most well-maintained buildings switched on back-up generators. At a restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center, 500 diners finished their meals over candlelight and then rode an elevator running on emergency generator power to steet-level. Meanwhile, the rest of the city remained in darkness. It was reported that at Columbia University two blind students, being accustomed to darkness, led their classmates out of a basement lecture hall. Hotels were beacons for tourists, who were ushered into ballrooms, lobbies, and spare rooms with free coffee and snacks. Since 1965's blackout scare, The New York Hilton had been keeping candle pillars in guestrooms for an emergency just like this one. In highrise buildings across the city, people became stranded in elevators, restaurants, and offices. In some of these buildings where water was electrically pumped, residents were left to thirst.

The blackout of 77 would trigger the largest mass arrest in NYC city history, with over 3,700 people being arrested and thrown into crowded cells and holding pens- eight times the number of people arrested during the 1968 riots. By comparison, the Blackout of 1965 only resulted in 5 cases of looting. The jails were so crowded and poorly conditioned that the National Conference of Black Lawyers initiated a lawsuit against the city on behalf of the alleged looters.

Most of the blackout arrests happened beginning at daybreak on July 14th. NYPD officers were under strict orders to not shoot looters or rowdy citizens, which they complied with. Tell that to somebody the next time they scream that today's cops fear for their lives when dealing with black suspects. The NYPD didn't feel threatened enough to shoot looters in the middle of the city's worst blackout. Said the Police Commissioner of Public Relations in 1977: “They were under orders to break up unruly crowds or looters by charging with their nightsticks but not to shoot over heads.”

But acts and attitudes of racism persisted in the effort to maintain order. At the onset of the blackout, Harlem cops were immediately dispatched to white areas downtown to ensure the safety there. The executive director of the Uptown Chamber of Commerce alleged that "By the time [cops] came uptown the people were in the streets and the looting had begun." Had Harlem cops stayed in Harlem for all of the blackout, perhaps there would have been less looting and property damage. In another example of racism during the blackout, a black storeowner shot a pistol in the air to scare away looters and was promptly arrested by police.

Most of the people arrested for looting were minorities in the poorest parts of The Bronx and Brooklyn. Reported Time Magazine in 1977:

"...What shocked the city, and much of the world, was that tens of thousands of blacks and Hispanics poured from their tenements and barrios—in 16 areas—to produce an orgy of looting. In Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto, in Manhattan's Harlem, in the South Bronx, the violence and plundering approached the levels of the 1968 riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The cry echoed through the ghettos: "It's Christmastime, it's Christmastime!" But to... countless... New Yorkers of all races, it was "a night of terror."

50 new Pontiacs valued at $250,000 (a little over a million in today's money) were hotwired and driven out of the showroom at a black-owned Bronx dealership, while a multitude of stores were looted and destroyed across Brooklyn. There were scenes of people scurrying the streets with entire couch sets and TV's- a free for all of thievery. One Bronx furniture store owner lost $55K in goods (237K today), and after the blackout offered $25 ($107 today) for anybody who returned a TV. There were reports of men snatching women's purses. One tickled New York Amsterdam News writer reported the weird and amusing sight of looters in mink coats despite the sweltering July heat.

But if you think looters were just targeting fancy items for shits and giggles, think again. In the desperate economy, most people saw an opportunity for business or an ease on their already tight budgets. Many stolen items were baby formula, canned goods, diapers, baby food, and clothing. According to writer Ernesto Quinonez, housewives in Spanish Harlem were the ones who initially saw the blackout's biggest opportunity. In his piece for the New York Times, he detailed how a friend's father nabbed most of the neighborhood's diapers. For months after the blackout, those who stole critical items (that were often sold overpriced in the hood) made a good profit by selling them discounted in "blackout black markets." Historians and analysts agree that the growing racial tensions and the crappy economy acted as catalysts for all the looting. I'd love for someone to go back and catalog how many family finances were positively impacted by the blackout. Time Magazine reported on people justifying looting in 1977:

"P.F., a 28-year-old Hispanic in Harlem, sounded like a shipping clerk reading off an invoice list [when describing the items he looted.] Any remorse? "I've got three kids and I don't have no job. I had the opportunity to rob and I robbed. I'd do it again. I don't feel bad about it." Said a young woman who called herself Afreeka Omfree: "It's really sort of beautiful. Everybody is out on the streets together. There's sort of a party atmosphere." Declared a young man in Bushwick: "Prices have gone too high. Now we're going to have no prices. When we get done, there ain't gonna be no more Broadway." Said a man in his 30s, grasping a wine bottle in one hand and a TV set in another: "You take your chance when you get a chance." Added Gino, 19, a father of two: "We're poor, and this is our way of getting rich."

A chunk of looters in the Bronx targeted DJ equipment from Electronic stores. At the time, hip-hop was a relatively small genre exclusive to the Bronx- but after the blackout, hip-hop would soon be heard across the Burroughs, ultimately allowing it to spread throughout the rest of the country. The spread of Hip Hop after the blackout can't be quantified, but hip-hop researcher Joe Schloss said it's likely the genre was greatly impacted by the event. In addition to grocery and electronic stores, another type of place that was frequently looted were drugstores, likely both for recreational kicks and to manage health. The consequences of depleting neighborhood stores of essential items were obvious. Reported Time Magazine in 1977:

"Shouted another man at a gang of teen-agers who had looted a drugstore: "If my mother gets sick in the night and needs her nitroglycerin, where am I gonna go? Maybe you don't care, but where am I supposed to buy my pills?" Next morning, a young woman walked along Third Avenue, desperately looking for any food store that might be open and unlooted. "I'm trying to buy some bread," she said. "I can't find none."

Some vigilantes in close-knit neighborhoods armed themselves with baseball bats and sticks to help local store-owners fend off looters. In addition to being looted, quite a few stores were set on fire. Some parts of the city, like Bushwick, were nearly destroyed by fire. 45 stores on Broadway alone were set ablaze. In total, over 1,000 fires to residential and retail locations were reported. About 4,000 people had to be evacuated from the subway system- while the city was already suffering from a BRUTAL heatwave. Imagine being miles under an already hot-ass city, for hours- in a tiny train car. Im hyperventilating just thinking about it. Many New Yorkers depended on the subway. If the blackout started while you were on the other side of town from your home, it was likely you were staying there unless you felt like walking or could pay upwards of $150 extra dollars for a cab ride. So many folks stranded an unwalkable distance from home kicked it at train stations, just waiting for the power to be restored.

There were other cases of price gouging in areas with less looting, with capitalist leeches charging exorbitant prices for flashlights, beverages, and food. Reported in Jet Magazine, the actor Richard Roundtree recalled being charged $5 for a sandwich when the normal price was around $1.

By the end of the blackout, the total cost in damage and lost revenue for the city of New York was over 300 million dollars. Four people were dead, three from arson and one by murder. But there were even more consequences. There were reports of rapes and assaults. Many business owners scoffed at the idea of taking out loans to re-open their stores. At least 600 fortunate business owners were extended grants from a 3 million dollar fund headed by New York Amsterdam News editor John L. Procope.

People were also left homeless. From Time Magazine in 1977:

"Rose Stevens, an elderly widow, wandered weeping down Broadway in Brooklyn, looking for a new place to live after spending the night alone in her $57-a-month apartment above a meat market that had been burned out by vandals. "I wish I died," she cried. "I'm almost 70 years old, and I have no place to go."

Everybody agreed that arsonists deserved to be punished, but black citizens were divided about how to view and punish the looters. Similar thoughts from racist whites (who disregarded the city's floundering economy in their quickness to brand all looters as lazy lawless niggers) and respectability-politic-obeying blacks (who wanted to distance themselves from the criminal label) converged for moments of judgement. It wasn't just white New Yorkers calling looters animals. New York Amsterdam News reported on the conflicting thoughts from black citizens. Said one citizen:

"Although I took no part in it, I do sympathize with those people who have children and took food for their mouths...the actions of the people was somewhat justified although illegal."

And another:

"The looting didn't prove anything at all other than to set our local economy back twenty years. The looters stabbed all right thinking black people once in the back and once caught, shed alligator tears about their civil rights being violated. They were brave moving around in the dark, and they shouldn't complain now since the lights have come back on."

Responses like the one above were met with astute criticism from people like Bedstuy Youth In Action chairman Sylvester Leaks, who said:

"It is very easy for those of us who have hocked our salaries through credit cards to be smug and moralistic about looters. The outpouring of the city's Black and Puerto Rican masses demonstrate that they were not thugs but people hungry, in need of jobs and with their unemployment insurance exhausted."

A black Bedstuy police sergeant wasn't buying it, and was reported as saying:

"The lights went out. A bunch of greedy people took advantage. Plain and simple. Don't go with all that sociological bullshit."

Even with the danger and risk of arrest, there was a lot of fun to be had during those 25 hours without electricity. Survivors of the blackout tell stories of chilling on rooftops and stoops, smoking and drinking with neighbors, stacking dominos, playing cards, and grilling all their perishable foods to pass the time.

Parties were thrown with battery operated tape players. Some of the few open bars and restaurants sold perishable foods and beverages at reduced prices (or even gave them away for free) to make use of their supplies of ice and beer (which would otherwise melt or go bad in without refrigeration.) An Upper East Side bar even took the party outside for a block party that included guests like Andy Warhol and Calvin Klein. Said one woman quoted in Time Magazine as visiting four bars during the blackout: "We're typical New Yorkers. We're going to get smashed." A man told The New York Times:

“The city was alive with hundreds of people in the streets, many dancing and just having fun. Latin music was blaring out of battery-operated boomboxes, and the entire walk was musical. I admit I found myself dancing and taking a longer route home just to enjoy the festivities."

A black writer for New York Amsterdam News agreed with his assessment, saying:

"All in all it was an [sic] night to remember. With everyone partying and socializing and just plain having a ball, perhaps ConEd will be deluged with requests for blackouts."

Context Clues: Why I Want To Experience It First-Hand

As a lover of the zombie apocalypse scenario, a small part of me yearns for just a bit of anarchy. Especially in a city like New York, where some of my best Summer memories are. Someone recently asked me after watching the zombie thriller Train To Busan how I'd feel the zombie apocalypse would be different between a place like South Korea where there are no guns, and America where there are guns-a-plenty. I returned to this question when considering the NYC blackout, because guns were in such short supply among civilians due to legal constraints. It's fascinating to me to consider how a city-wide blackout would fare in Los Angeles (a city full of guns and people willing to shoot them, as evidenced by 1992's riots after the Rodney King Verdict) versus New York, where people were angry but without too many guns. And believe me, people were very angry... so apocalypse-like anarchy was the reality.

To be honest a lot of my fantasy time travel destinations are in New York, but the blackout holds a certain charm for me. If I was there, I'd be on a rooftop somewhere in the Bronx or Harlem with my lover, smoking up trash 70's weed, listening to Fleetwood Mac's Rumors on a record player, and drinking wine I swiped from a bodega, waiting for the end of the world. Even as I type this, I wonder if instead of chilling like I'm claiming, I'd be holing myself up in an apartment with looted canned goods and supplies waiting for the end. For many of New York's poorest, who were car-less and trapped on an island in darkness (before cell phones and before the internet), it likely did seem like the end of the world. A woman in the Bronx told the New York Amsterdam News that she and her neighbors thought bombs were going to drop from the sky.

1977 was an interesting time in American history because there were a lot of big changes in the air. 1977 was just two years after the end of the Vietnam War and nine years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (and the ensuing nationwide civil unrest and rioting). Roots, which debuted in January 1977 and was viewed by millions, was one of the first accurate glimpses into the brutality of slavery. The homophobe Anita Bryant kicked off her Save Our Children campaign to overturn Miami legislation that banned discrimination against homosexuals, which caused nationwide tensions between an increasingly vocal LGBT community and the increasingly empowered conservative movement. But more than anything else, 1977 was the year that Americans were anxious about the price of gas, the cost of living, and the general state of the economy. As Ebony Magazine reported that same year:

"On the very day of the New York City blackout, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that their latest figures reveal the biggest jump in the number of people living below the poverty level since they started keeping this record in 1959. From 1974 to 1975, the number of people living below the poverty level increased by more than 21/2 million to a total of 25,877,000."

Government officials weren't completely clueless. In 1977 Jet Magazine reported US Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young as saying:

"If you turn out the lights the folks will steal... especially if they're hungry. You've got to realize that in New York you're running at unemployment levels of about 30 to 40 percent amongst young adults."

We know that the state of the economy catalyzed blackout damage because most of the looting and destruction took place in frustrated low income neighborhoods. New Yorkers at the time were sick of President Gerald Ford (1974-1977), who had been stingy with giving money to the city for resources. In 1975 he said he would veto any bill that would call for a "federal bailout of New York City."

NYC rent, which on average had been $200 a month in the 1960s, had jumped to $335 in the next decade. The national unemployment rate was down slightly at 6%, but still double the rates of the 1960s. 42% of NYC's working age population was unemployed, and crime was also on the rise. 1977 was also part of a period of increasing desire among NYC officials to clean up crime and the city's smutty reputation, especially in Times Square. In the midst of the city's problems, Mario M. Cuomo (yes, the current Governor of NY's father) and Abraham D. Beame were locked in a dramatic battle for the democratic primary nomination for mayor. As for The Bronx, it had been on fire since 1970- quite literally. According to New York Post in 2010,

"Seven different census tracts in The Bronx lost more than 97% of their buildings to fire and abandonment between 1970 and 1980; 44 tracts (out of 289 in the borough) lost more than 50%."

The fires were partly the result of crime, borne from lack of jobs and opportunities that created a general sense of despair and hopelessness that rippled across the borough. But the fires are also to be blamed on a bureaucratic budget-cut, when the borough closed 12 fire stations to save a few million dollars and close the budget deficit. Three months before the blackout, the new president, Jimmy Carter, spoke about America's moral obligation to fighting the energy crisis.

Recall how I've discussed in plenty of my videos and writings that a crucial change in language occurred in the early 70s in which "tough-on-crime" was racist dog-whistling for "the mass incarceration of niggers?" Unfortunately the blackout had lasting consequences for the black and brown community, even though it served as a major red flag that American cities were neglecting their lower class citizens. Instead of acknowledging the need for resources and jobs in black New York communities, many of the city's business leaders and politicians pushed for harsh consequences for blackout looters. The same conservatives who were ruffled by the black power and civil rights movements, along with the women's rights and LGBT rights coalitions, rallied around a desire to punish looters extensively. This would ramp up arguments for tougher consequences on crimes of all types- eventually leading to Giuliani's low tolerance New York and the crowded NY jails we know and hate today.

Thanks to the issues of the blackout, however, when another one occured in 2003, the city remained orderly because officials didn't want another looting free-for-all on their hands and actually had emergency plans set into place. A slightly lower unemployment rate and a more robust economy, along with tough Giuliani crime laws and a post-9/11 fear that the power outage was terrorist related, definitely helped the situation remain calm. While it led to increased discrimination against black citizens, for me the 1977 blackout was also a cultural moment for New Yorkers that triggers old heads to say, "You just had to be there." I would have loved to see it, experience it, and live to write about it.

What do you think? Would you time travel to witness the 1977 New York Blackout? Why or why not? Tell me in the comments! Also be sure to check out the monster list of sources for a more immersive faux-time travel experience below.

Primary Sources

Part of time traveling to the blackout would include sticking around to hear talk in the barbershops, beauty salons, and pool halls about what went down. I'd also be checking out all of the local papers for commentary and statistics. Below is a list of articles from New York's star black newspaper, the New York Amsterdam News that I'd read if I was in 1977. If you have a New York City Public Library Card (shoutout to my ex!), you can access them for free.

Other relevant primary source articles:

Impact Assessment of the 1977 New York Blackout (Department of Energy, 1978)
Aid For New York Blackout Victims (Jet Magazine, 1977)
ARRESTS IN BLACKOUT DWARF '60'S RIOTS (Selwyn Raab, 1977)
Letter: On Unemployment Statistics (The New York Times, 1977)
The Tip of The Iceberg: Looting During the Blackout (Ebony Magazine 1977, Pictured Below)

The Blackout: Night of Terror (Time Magazine 1977, Pictured Below) This article is definitely a must-read, especially if you want to sniff out bias towards the Law and Order rhetoric that would become so popular afterwards.